Read it.

Not a bad record for a country that has no actual reason to exist.

Don’t forget to send a card. I’m sure it would be appreciated.

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

— Peloponnesian War 3:82.

There is nothing new under the sun….

Read it.

‘Precious Reynolds’? *sigh* On the other hand, perhaps it’s that name that helped to make her strong.

Read it.

Conservative and libertarian critics of immigration like to cite Milton Friedman’s observation that “[y]ou cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state,” which co-blogger Ken Anderson recently endorsed. The fear is that, given relatively open borders, immigrants from poor countries will flock to wealthy ones and undermine their economies by consuming huge amounts of welfare benefits.

This would seem fairly obvious.

British newspapers, for example, are rife with stories about Muslim terrorists and purveyors of terrorism who live off of the British welfare state, a singularly appalling situation.

I suspect that if one were to look at the incidence of, say, illegal Latino immigrants in the U.S. getting welfare benefits, either illicitly or due to White Liberal Guilt in such places as the Left Coast and the Other Left Coast, the situation in the U.S. would be equally disturbing.

I am a great admirer of Friedman and his scholarship. But he was not an expert on immigration, and, as far as I can tell, he never systematically studied the evidence on the impact of immigration on political support for the welfare state. That evidence overwhelmingly shows that ethnic heterogeneity greatly reduces support for welfare state spending because voters are less willing to support welfare programs if they believe that a large percentage of the money is going to members of a different racial or ethnic group.

Perhaps so, but that reluctance hasn’t expressed itself politically so far — at least not very effectively. The situation may change in the future, but we pessimists aren’t going to be holding our breath waiting for it.

This feedback effect creates a difficult dilemma for liberals and leftists who support immigration but also want to expand the welfare state. Paul Krugman calls the welfare-immigration tradeoff an “agonizing issue” for liberal Democrats. But for libertarians and other supporters of economic liberty, immigration is a win-win game. It is both an important exercise of economic freedom in its own right, and has the secondary effect of constraining the welfare state.

However much that may be true in the long run, in the short term it just degrades the quality of life for everybody, and those of us who see the glass as half-full (and emptying rapidly) are unwilling to assume the existence of some guarantee that the process will bottom out before we are all in the poorhouse.

One of the problems with libertarianism as a practical political program is its Polyannaish insistence that ‘everything will work out in the end’, when all that bystanders can actually see are things descending rapidly into the toilet.

Faith may indeed be the hope for things unseen, but there isn’t a lot of faith in the modern world outside of the Ummah, and they can hardly be called libertarians.

Read it.

Abdullah Mohammed, 51, of 125th Street, was at the Harlem supermarket yesterday morning when he started arguing loudly at the customer service desk with William Perry, 70, a former truck driver. Perry was at the desk buying Lotto tickets when Mohammed stepped on his foot, irking the older man, according to his older brother, Charles Perry.

Mohammed, who was clad in a peach linen suit, was booted out of the store, but stormed back in minutes later and cornered Perry in the meat aisle, two employees said. He then allegedly whipped out a razor and slashed Perry across the neck.

Bringing tribal Arabia home to the modern world. Them open borders sure are fun, aren’t they?

The Other McCain has some fun with the Gullible Media.

How many times do people have to make fools out of themselves over these “too good to check” stories before they wise up to the telltale clues of a hoax?

Good question. I guess being a journalism major isn’t the high-IQ thing that it purports to be.

Steve Sailer, of course, is tickled:

White guys … What would the world do without us? We’re the straw that stirs the drink.

Read it.

The tactic which has come into vogue, particularly for SEIU protests, is to go to your opponents’ home to protest, even if it means frightening the children in the house.

Pro-illegal immigrant groups in Rhode Island have taken it one step further, not only protesting in front of the home of Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, but also knocking on neighbors’ doors in protest of Rhode Island’s participation in the federal Secure Communities Program.

As detailed here before, Governor Linc Chafee and a host of others want to turn Rhode Island into a sanctuary state, refusing even to participate in the Secure Communities Program which requires that fingerprints for all people arrested on other charges be sent to Homeland Security for an immigration status check.  The feds say localities cannot opt out, and AG Kilmartin supports the program as a way of getting criminals out of the community.

Chafee has tried to prevent Rhode Island’s participation even after a plea from the victim of a kidnapping and rape committed by an illegal alien.

Read it.

Just goes to show that you don’t have to be stupid to be Green.

Read it.

You want serious, try Wikipedia.

Freeberg likes Palin. But we knew that.

Many’s the time I’ve heard a Palin hater say “I don’t have a better candidate in mind, but I’m hoping one will emerge.”

Well, I’m not a ‘Palin hater’, but I do have a better candidate in mind — several, in fact — although none that I can endorse as wholeheartedly as I could Reagan (and, before him, Goldwater). So I could vote for Palin, if she got the nomination; not least because it would cause the sphincter muscles of over a million people to release simultaneously — but that’s more a reflection on me than on her.

I like having former Governors run for President, because the approaches that Governors develop are more directly applicable to the approach needed as President than the approaches that legislators develop, which are in many respects precisely the wrong ones.

Every time we have a former legislator (typically a Senator) get elected President, we wind up with a crappy President. Kennedy, Nixon, the elder Bush, and Obama are the wounds I’ve had to live with, but think it holds true back at least a century. (Yeah, yeah, Lincoln — but I think he would have been a better President if he had been a Governor first; he made a lot of mistakes that people tend to forget because he got some big things right.) This is not to say that having a former Governor as President is any guarantee; the two Roosevelts, Wilson, and (ack, phtooey) Carter testify to that. But at least they know how the standard controls work; Obama could seriously profit from some form of training wheels.

I’m willing to make allowances for somebody with executive experience outside of government, such as Cain — but that isn’t a very large allowance, because an executive outside of government can put programs in place easily, modify them easily, and get rid of them easily if they don’t work out; don’t try that in government (hello, Romneycare).

Most especially, having a track record as a Governor gives a pretty direct indication as to how somebody will do when faced with a decision that needs to be made, and can often save people from making a big mistake, if they’re in the mood to be saved, which isn’t always the case. Unfortunately, it won’t help in situations where the only choices are Dumb and Dumber, which is what we usually get in elections — but it sometimes concentrates the mind during the nomination process.

Sadly, in Rumsfeldian terms, we go to elections with the candidates we have, not the candidates we’d like to have … which is why I don’t put a lot of effort into poking around in the background of potential nominees: Typically sufficient useful knowledge thereof comes out during the campaign to make a reasonable choice. And I’ll spend more time thinking about Palin this time a year from now, because I don’t feel any compelling need to do so before then.

And it’s nice to have True Believers like Freeberg (whose general approach to things is very sound) around to provide drive-by voters such as myself with the materials needed to make a choice.

Oh, my ideal candidate? The movie character typically played by Angelina Jolie (which doesn’t have any connection to the actual Angelina Jolie, of course). Watch SALT or WANTED — or even, God help us, TOMB RAIDER — if you don’t know what I mean.

Read it.

You may not be interested in formal grammar – I wasn’t, until I read the article – but it’s an interesting thing.

Read it.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection asks the crucial question.

I do grouchy really well.  In fact, grouchy is why I started this blog (along with frustration, anger and fear of the “other”).

Grouchy gave birth to the blogosphere, and grouchy is what keeps it going after all these centuries.  Without grouchy and high speed cable internet access, we’d be North Korea.

And that about sums it up.

Read it.

Well, of you spend all of your money on welfare and can no longer afford your own aircraft carriers, you have to work with what you’ve got.

Read it.

Read it.

The claims come as four Tower Hamlets Muslims were jailed for at least 19 years for attacking a local white teacher who gave religious studies lessons to Muslim girls.

Read it.

Five weeks after the fall of the Egyptian regime, Ayman Anwar Mitri’s apartment was torched. When he showed up to investigate, he was bundled inside by bearded Islamists.

Mr. Mitri is a member of the Christian Coptic minority that accounts for one-tenth of the country’s 83 million people. The Islamists accused him of having rented the apartment—by then unoccupied—to loose Muslim women.

Inside the burnt apartment, they beat him with the charred remains of his furniture. Then, one of them produced a box cutter and performed what he considered an appropriate punishment under Islam: He amputated Mr. Mitri’s right ear.

“When they were beating me, they kept saying: ‘We won’t leave any Christians in this country,'” Mr. Mitri recalled in a recent interview, two months after the March attack. Blood dripped through a plastic tube from his unhealed wound to a plastic container. “Here, there is a war against the Copts,” he said.

His attackers, who were never arrested or prosecuted, follow the ultrafundamentalist Salafi strain of Islam that promotes an austere, Saudi-inspired worldview. Before President Hosni Mubarak was toppled on Feb. 11, the Salafis mostly confined themselves to preaching. Since then, they’ve entered the political arena, drawing crowds and swaying government decisions. Salafi militants also have blocked roads, burned churches and killed Copts.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans available, Muslims will quite cheerfully blow each other up.

The chief ‘Islamophobes’ in the world appear to be Muslims.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

New Hampshire, appropriately enough, is #1. Indiana, my home state, is #3.

The top 5 are all Red states and the bottom 5 are all Blue states. That ought to tell you something.

Read it.

Detailed specs haven’t been offered, we only know that it will feature “cutting-edge internal components,” but we can tell you there are a bevy of customization options. You can choose everything from the wood stain color, to keyboard fonts, to etched brass lids or clockwork gears like the original design (except these will tick and turn).

And a beautiful thing it is, too.

Read it.

Jihadi media organizations are forming Facebook pages to bypass restrictions on terrorist organizations, and to pass on videos, pictures, and documents to followers. While Facebook bans inciting violence or hateful content, jihadi media groups slide underneath the restrictions because they are poorly known.

Yet another reason to dislike Facebook.

Read it.

France was punished on Thursday for not taking proper care of its hamsters.

The Court of Justice in Luxembourg, theEuropean Union’s highest court, ruled Thursday that France had failed to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace, sometimes known as the European hamster, the last wild hamster species in Western Europe. If France does not adjust its agricultural and urbanization policies sufficiently to protect it, the court said, the government will be subject to fines of as much as $24.6 million.

I am not making this up.

Apparently, even other Europeans hate the French.

Read it.

Similar to a move made in Illinois a few months ago, Amazon has shut down its Associates program in Connecticut after the state imposed a sales tax measure that would tax any purchases made online starting July 1.

Politicians just never learn, do they?

Read it.

Scientists say they’ve finally discovered why smokers tend to gain some weight when they kick the habit.

It turns out that nicotine can rev up brain cells that normally signal people to stop eating when they’re full, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Read it.

This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve seen in the rapidly disintegrating ‘artists trying to make some money from what they do’ space.

Read it.

The man, who has not been identified, is married to a Frenchwoman, but does not allow her to leave the family home freely, it was claimed.

I hate to see evidence that the French are ahead of us in anything, but this….

Read it.

On April 20th of this year, a group called the BCHRT (British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, a sort of maple-syrup-flavored version of a Stalinist show-trial committee) fined stand-up comedian Guy Earle $15,000 for offending a lesbian woman, Lorna Pardy, from the stage at an open-mike comedy night back in 2007. The owners of the club which hosted the offending performance were also fined $7,500.

Thank God you don’t live in Canada. Canada is what the U.S. would look like had the American Revolution failed, a prospect more dreadful than any other I can think of.

The Other McCain calls foul.

So now, it seems, Gingrich’s wife has helped destroy his presidential campaign.

Oh, I think his habit of discarding Current Wife when he feels like a change has had a bit to do with it, but certainly she’s piling on.

For the record: If one claims to be a conservative but discards a present spouse merely because one feels some personal advantage in doing so, don’t be surprised when people assume that your other principles are equally subject to change without notice.

Just sayin’.

Lileks.

It’s probably not one of those Smart cars where your knees are touching your earlobes, unless we have gangs of amoral Smurfs roaming the town. Probably not an electric car, because criminals, being rather dim, would think you can’t outrun the cops unless you feed the engine more batteries, like shovelfuls of coal. Pour on some D-cells! They’re gaining!

Read it.

So here, just for fun, and woefully incomplete, are a list of “rights” recently discovered. Remember: there can be no rights without responsibilities. If you invoke a right, you imply a responsibility. The real question is then who has the responsibility. The question can never be what had the responsibility, because inanimate objects are powerless.

Thus, “governments” cannot have a responsibility because these are fictions, they are groupings and gatherings of men. The burden is always to identify which men have the responsibility.

Some of these are almost certainly not meant to be “rights” in the philosophic sense, but modern people are so used to speaking in terms of “rights” that they use the term indiscriminately.

Read it.

Good. Perhaps now he’ll go away and quit bothering people.

Read it.

Hundreds of Nepalese women who emigrate to Arab countries in search of better jobs and wages, are unaccounted for. According to husbands and relatives they become victims of prostitution and slavery. The migrants who manage to return, show signs of physical exhaustion, injuries, psychological damage and are often infected with AIDS. To resolve this tragic situation, the Government of Nepal wants to block migration to Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan where most cases are registered. In 2010, 242 women emigrated for work and were never heard of again.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Of course, Islam has no problem with slavery. And non-Muslims are pretty much fair game for anything that a Muslim wants to do, especially ‘polytheists’ such as the Hindus of Nepal.

Mencius Moldbug is back with us after a long hiatus.

And there was much rejoicing.

Read it.

Whoa. That’ like Vladimir Putin accusing someone of being authoritarian.

(Is it just me, or does Rowan Atkinson Williams look like some homeless guy dressed up as an Archbishop for a play?)

George Will is shocked (shocked, I tell you) that the Obama administration is attempting to buy the votes of the union goons upon which his re-election depends.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

In 2001, when approximately 80,000 people worked in 7,500 music stores, the iPod was invented. Largely because of that and other technological changes, today only about 20,000 people work in 2,500 music stores. Should those 60,000 people be entitled to extra welfare because they are “victims” of technology? Does it matter if the 60,000 have found work in new jobs — perhaps making or selling electronic devices?

The Democrat answer is, ‘They don’t? Well, we’ll fix that!’

In 2008, Americans bought 1.4 billion books made of paper and 200 million e-books. Soon they will buy more e-books than paper books, and half the nation’s bookstores will be gone. Should the stores’ former employees be entitled to special assistance beyond unemployment compensation?

If they don’t, they soon will. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will make sure of it. All those votes to buy, and all it takes is borrowing more money from Communist China. What’s not to like?

Read it.

Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers.

The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room’s window using Google Earth-enabled technology.

The best rooms for each traveler are automatically ranked using Room 77’s proprietary Room Rank algorithm that adjusts to each individual’s preferences for high or low floor, distance from elevator, view importance and need for connecting rooms. Each room is then scored with a color-coded match percentage indicating: “strong match” (green), “fair match” (yellow) and “weak match” (red). Room 77 also gives travelers insider tips on how to request desirable room(s) directly from the hotel and increase the probability of securing one.

The future is here.

For now the company is focusing on indexing every hotel room at every three- to five-star hotel and resort worldwide, which the company estimates to total approximately 25,000 properties.

Although not quite yet for us Best Western types….

Read it.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

‘Sought sanctuary in the churches and mosques’? Sorry, Charlie, that only works against Christians and Jews.

Human rights activists appealed for urgent international pressure on the regime, warning that unless Maher al-Assad was halted, his well-known “thirst for blood” would lead to a massacre.

“The world seems to be standing by as a latter-day Genghis Khan marauds through the country,” one activist in Damascus said.

“Maher is a man with a proven record of butchery for butchery’s sake. He takes a sadistic delight in inflicting human misery.”

Funny how they’ve apparently never had a problem with that before now. I guess they were too busy yelling about Israel.

“If the West was prepared to take action at the last minute to save the people of Benghazi from Gaddafi’s retribution, can they not do something to save the people of Jisr al-Shughur?”

Well, that depends. How much oil do we get from Syria? Not a lot, I’m betting.

Britain and France finally submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council on Wednesday following weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations in which Moscow, which has a naval base in the country and regards Mr Assad as an ally, has stubbornly refused to consider international action.

Boy, that U.N. is certainly a useful organization.

Western diplomats indicated Russia was yet to be wholly convinced by the measure, which appeared to be an attempt to expose Moscow to accusations of disregard for human life.

Moscow? Disregard for human life? Why, the very idea!

In an unmistakable message to the Kremlin, David Cameron said in the House of Commons: “If anyone votes against that resolution, or tries to veto it, that should be on their conscience.”

Yeah, that’s a sanction to which the Kremlin has always been sensitive.

What I’m wondering is, whether the Turks will resettle them somehow, or play Arab and just set up ‘refugee camps’ on the border to create an ongoing terrorism problem, as happened with the ‘Palestinians’.

Read it.

And one quickly realizes that not only is the earth full, but Thomas Friedman is also full … of it, and of himself.

This sort of thumb-sucker (to which all columnists resort when they’ve got a hangover and a deadline knocking on the door at the same time) is on a par with the rich people who clamor to have their taxes increased, while surreptitiously nudging  under the carpet the plain and simple thing they could do to help out: Rich people can always give their money to the government (but sadly never do), and people like Thomas Friedman can always remove themselves from the gene pool (but, even more sadly, never do).

One thing of which the world most certainly has an excess is people with really urgent ideas about how you can make your life worse in order to make their lives better.

She said, “somebody has to
Clean all this away.
Somebody, SOMEBODY
Has to, you see.”
Then she picked out two Somebodies.
Sally and me.
— The Cat in the Hat Comes Back

UPDATE: If we run out of living room, perhaps some of us could bunk with ol’ Tom in his 11,400 sq ft in Bethesda.

Read it.

The reporter, by quoting the mother complaining that black-on-black crime, unlike these present crimes, is not taken serously, is telling us that these present crimes are black-on-white crimes. Such is the Pravda-like journalism of liberal society, in which you get at the truth by reading tea leaves.

And yet this ‘mother’ would be at the head of the line to complain about racism if anyone were to be so foolish as to point out that, well, black-on-black or black-on-white, it’s still black folks committing these crimes.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Perhaps they decided to dish it out for a change rather than being limited to taking it.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways  are best.

I’m waiting for some international environazi group to sue him for adding to global warming with his horse’s farts.

Hey, it could happen.

Read it.

An Adelaide-based entrepreneur has hit upon a novel method of fighting global warming: he intends to exterminate Australia’s vast population of feral camels by means of gunfire from helicopters and jeeps, so preventing the beasts from unleashing a deadly planet-wrecking miasma of greenhouse gas from their rumbling guts.

The idea is that the War On Dromedaries would be paid for – and indeed, turn a profit – by selling government carbon credits issued on the basis that a dead camel cannot be emitting methane by means of belch or trouser cough. Methane is a vastly more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂, so the elimination of even quite small sources of it can equate to a substantial carbon-emissions reduction.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Members of a Latino gang affiliated with the Mexican Mafia conspired for nearly 20 years to drive African-Americans out of the Southern California city of Azusa through violence and intimidation, federal authorities alleged Tuesday.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I’ll bet they belong to ‘La Raza’.

“The Azusa 13 gang waged a campaign of hate during a two-decade crime spree in which African-Americans were harassed and attacked,” U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. said in a written statement Tuesday. “We hope that this federal case will signal the end of this racist behavior and will help vindicate all of the victims who have suffered over the years.”

I’m curious as to why it took so long.

Read it.

This is, of course, like members of a synagogue distributing free copies of Mein Kampf. What are these morons thinking?

Read it.

The suits claim Hirsch suffered “an injury” from being denied access. But it is unlikely the 31-year-old Hasidic Jew would patronize some of the establishments he cites — including the non-kosher City Crab restaurant.

Gee, there’s a hint.

He targeted a pedicure station at the Red & White Spa in SoHo — even though he has no feet.

Thank you, George H.W. Bush, for this supremely stupid piece of legislation.

Steve Sailer has, as usual, many useful things to say.

By the way, can we try to avoid phrases like “science has recently shed light” — unless you are Thomas Dolby on a nostalgia tour? The research cited was done by living, breathing researchers, whose hard work deserves at least the recognition that they are human beings, not “science.” Moreover, remembering that human beings are making these arguments, not “science,” has the salutary effect of keeping in mind that humans aren’t infallible.

While peripheral to his main point, that’s one of the sharpest things I’ve read in years.

Also, let me put in a word here for an old-fashioned class system. The idea was that there were respectable modes of behavior for whatever class you aspire to, so you don’t have to make up your mind a la carte on every damn thing all day long. You just look at what the people in the class of which you wish to be considered a respectable member do, and imitate it.

Another good point.

The opposite of the Costco shopping experience is car shopping. Dealers work very hard to make to make buying a car a stressful experience that preys upon your class insecurities. Their ultimate goal is to make you want to impress the salesman by overpaying for the car.

That explains a lot….

Read it.

Terrorists? In North Carolina? That’s impossible, surely.

22-year old Zakariya “Zak” Boyd is the second defendant to enter into a guilty plea in the case of several men who plotted to wage violent jihad overseas. His father and cell ringleader Daniel Patrick Boyd pleaded guilty on Feb. 9 to one count conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim individuals in a foreign country in addition to one count of material support.

Well, ‘Boyd’ is Scottish, but what kind of a name is ‘Zakariya’?

According to a superseding indictment, Daniel Boyd trained for battle in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Along his journey, he met Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of the now deceased al-Qaida head Osama bin Laden. Boyd then tried to pass his radical beliefs on to his own sons.

Daniel Boyd was recorded by the FBI preaching violence to his family. He told his sons Zak and Dylan, another co-defendant, that “the blood of Muslims has become cheap…because most of the Muslims have abandoned jihad.”

Oh. But I thought Muslim extremism was caused by poverty and despair among benighted foreigners?